The Big Rock Candy Mountain (68 page)

Lights were on all over the resort, an umbrella of white dazzle. The potted palms moved a little in the first night wind; the cement floor of the pavilion was still radiating warmth from the sun. At the bathing concession the attendant was just closing his shutters.

“Sorry, Chet,” he said. “I got to be checked in and have everything closed up by nine.”

“Hell, you could let us go out,” Chet said. “I don't need any lifeguard.”

The boy hesitated. “Come on,” Chet said. “It's no skin off you. I'll be quiet.”

“Oh, all right,” the boy said. He looked curiously at Laura as he passed out two keys with rings of elastic on them, two towels, and two gray cotton bathing suits. “You'll have to undress in the dark,” he said. “I can't leave any lights on.”

“That's okay,” Chet said. He held the gate open for Laura and raised his hand to the attendant. “I'll do as much for you some day,” he said.

Going back through the rows of dressing rooms Laura clung to Chet's arm. “Are you sure it's all right? We could have gone and sat in the car.”

“Sure it's all right. Everybody hangs together out here. It's okay.”

He found her dressing room for her with the help of a match, and by the door he pulled her to him and kissed her again. “You're pretty nice,” he said.

“Am I?” Her head was back, cocked, and her eyes glinted a little in a flake of light wavering across from the pavilion. “You're pretty nice yourself.”

“Like me better than anybody?”

“Oh,” she said, shivering. “Much!” She stood on tiptoe, pecked him with a kiss, and whipped laughing inside the dressing room before he could grab her. He was remembering the soft resilience of her body all the way over to his own room. She had a nice shape, more roundness to her, a better armful than any of these high school kids. She was a woman, not any little half-baked kid. There was no percentage in playing around with kids.

They went barefoot together out the long pier. To their right the pavilion was a blaze of light, the Moorish minarets lifting like green mushrooms from the glare, people moving around, the sound of barkers and the roar of the roller coaster and the yells of girls in the shake-up concessions coming loud and yet unimportant across the oily water. The air was cool, but when they slipped down the stairs and into the brine it felt warm, almost lukewarm, with a slippery, half-sticky feel to it from the salt.

For a while they floated quietly, the buoyant water holding them cradled, their feet lifting helplessly high in the water. Paddling himself like a canoe, Chet came close to Laura's vague pale shape. Heavy-sounding as cement, the water slopped against the salt-crusted piles under the pier.

“This is nice,” Laura said. “This is ever so much nicer than sitting in the car.”

“This is a pretty good place,” Chet said. “It's fun working out here.”

They drifted and paddled. “Wonder what Van and Gladys are doing now?” Chet said.

Laura said nothing for quite a while. “Do you like Gladys?” she said finally.

“I guess so. I don't know. Why?”

“I think she's cheap.”

“Yuh, I guess she is, a little.” He rowed himself around in a circle and came back to position with his feet pointing toward Laura. “She's probably giving Van quite a workout in that tunnel.”

“That's just it,” Laura said. Her voice was sharp. “I don't think a place like that is decent. They just fix it so all sorts of things can go on, and people like Van and Gladys like it.”

“Oh well,” Chet said. “Van can take care of himself. He's a pretty handy boy with the women.”

They were silent again, floating under the blurred noises of the pavilion. “Chet,” Laura said.

“Uh?”

“You're not like that, are you?”

“Like what?”

“Like Van. Chasing girls all the time just to see what he can get. Picking the cheapest ones because they're easy.”

“I picked you,” Chet said. “Not for that reason, though.”

“I know you're not like that,” she said. She waded toward him, the brine shining around her white shoulders. “You're clean,” she said, standing close to him and speaking with a shiver in her voice. “Just to look at you I could tell you were clean. Just to look at your hands.”

“My hands?” he said stupidly.

“You've got beautiful hands,” she said. “So big and long and square. I noticed them before I ever knew you, when I just saw you at a ballgame.”

Chet laughed self-consciously. “Big hands are a help playing ball.”

She reached out and took one, stroking it. “The skin is just like satin on them,” she said. “Like a girl's skin. I think you can judge people by their hands, don't you? Better than by their faces. I watch the hands of people down at school. Most of them are skinny, like claws, or else big fat wads of things.”

Her voice in the dark praising him, flattering him; the feel of her fingers moving on the skin of his hands, their skins touching with the slightly-sticky, slightly-slippery feeling of the salt water on them, excited him. He pulled her close, hard against him. “You're ... beautiful,” he said. The word was hard to get out.

Playfully she leaned back against his encircling arms and swayed as if she were in a hammock, and every movement brushed her body against his. He licked his lips, tasting salt, and cringed away a little from the intimate kiss of their skins under water.

“How old are you anyway, Chet?” she said.

“Nineteen,” Chet said. He had lied about his age so consistently at school, because he hated being the youngest member of the football team, that he almost believed it himself.

“Only nineteen,” she said, almost as if disappointed. “I'm twenty-one, did you know that?”

“I could tell you weren't any punk kid,” he said. “These little high school flappers give me a pain.”

“They're no worse than the boys,” she said. “They all go around pretending to be so grown up, necking and fooling around. They've got no more intention of getting married than the man in the moon.”

“Married!” Chet said. The word was like the word “beautiful,” a solemn and importunate and scary sound. “There's plenty of time to get married,” he said.

She had stopped swinging, and seemed to be searching his face, but in the dim light that flaked off the water he couldn't see her well. Then her head turned. “I never thought very much ...” he was saying, before he realized that she was crying.

“Good hell,” he said. “What's the matter, Laura?”

She continued to cry silently, standing with her face twisted away from him, and he gathered her unprotestingly close. “You shouldn't cry,” he said. “What's wrong?”

“I just ... keep thinking ... how impossible it is,” Laura said. She wiped her eyes on her upper arms to keep from getting salt in her eyes.

“How impossible what is?”

“You're only nineteen.”

“What difference does that make?”

“You won't want to get married for a long time,” she said, the words strangling out sideways, ending in a wail. “If I can't marry you I don't ever want to get married!”

Chet swallowed, standing very still, his arms like wood around her. “Well, good hell,” he said. “I love you, you know that, don't you?”

She was hard against him again, her fingers clenched on his arms. “Oh, I do!” she said. “I do, and I love you too, Chet. Terribly. I love you more than anything in the whole world.”

Chet lifted his head and looked over her white cap at the thick, glimmering water and the lights curving up along the roller coaster scaffolding in an intricate tracery that wavered in reflection toward him across the moving surface. “Aw honey,” he said, and patted her back.

“Chet,” she said, and put her face in the hollow of his shoulder. “I'm such a baby. I've been thinking and thinking, and I didn't know how you felt, whether you thought of me the way I did of you. A girl can't go on forever not knowing. I hate my home, and school, and everything but you. The only fun I have is watching you play ball and being proud of you, and seeing you afterwards.”

Chet swelled his chest, got self-conscious, and pushed her backward with it until she half laughed. He swung her around in the water like a pinwheel, and his strength seemed like something superhuman, something that could break down anything, tear things up by the roots, give him whatever he wanted. “I tell you what,” he said. “Soon as I'm out of school I'll get a job and we'll save, and pretty soon we'll get married. We don't have to wait till I'm twenty-one. I could pass for twenty-one most places.”

“Oh, Chet,” she said, her breath against his skin. “Oh, Chet!”

They stood in the deep shadow of the pier, their bodies locked together. Laura made tiny whimpering noises as he kissed her, breaking her mouth away and bringing it back eagerly. A chill not from the water shook Chet till his teeth chattered. With one hand he unbuttoned the shoulder strap of her suit.

Above them, as they stood in water to their shoulders, the noise of merrymakers in the concessions drifted unmeaningly, and the light splintered and shook over the moving water.

“Where can we go?” he whispered. “Up on the pier?”

Her hands pushed against his chest and she waded backward, stooping for the fallen suit around her ankles. “No,” she said. “No, Chet, not now, I don't want to, please!

“Please, Chet,” she said, as he reached for her again. He stopped, watching her pull the dark suit on again. She came up to him, ran her hands up and down his sides, pulled them away with a little laugh and put them behind her. “Oh Chet,” she said, “you'll think I'm one of those like Gladys.”

“Bushwah,” Chet said sullenly. “You couldn't be like Gladys if you tried. But I don't see why you won't. We love each other, don't we?”

“If we didn't I'd be so ashamed I could die,” Laura said. “If I didn't know we'd be married, sometime soon ...”

“It can't be too soon for me,” Chet said.

She laid her head against his shoulder, and instantly the blood leaped up in his veins, hot and throbbing. “That'll be lovely,” she said with a little sigh.

“Then why not? There's nobody around. It's dark up there. Come on.”

“No, no please.”

“Why not?”

“Chet,” she said.

“What?”

“You don't carry anything around with you, do you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Those ... protection.”

“Oh,” he said. “No. But ...”

“See?” she said. “I knew you didn't. I knew you were clean. So you see, it wouldn't be safe, Chet.” She laid her hand on his arm. “Please wait.”

“Oh, all right,” he said. “But you're driving me crazy.”

They climbed the ladder to the pier. Walking back to the dressing rooms he had his arm around her under the suit, and by the time they reached her door they were stammering, stopping every five feet to kiss passionately. “Why not in here?” he said.

She beat her fists against his chest, but there was laughter in her voice, and she punctuated every four words with a kiss. “You great big impatient bullying thing!” she said. “Can't you even wait till I get used to the idea of being engaged?”

“No.”

“Well, you'll have to,” she said, and whisked in the door. He jumped after her, but the latch had clicked. A dim foot and ankle poked out below the swinging door. “Here,” she said. “You can kiss my big toe.”

Chet stooped and took her ankle, caressed it a moment, bent and bit her big toe savagely. She squealed, smothered the sound quickly.

“That'll teach you,” he said, and stalked off. But while he was dressing he was thinking how he had almost had her. Jeez, it was hard to imagine that it had been him out there in the water with her, and her suit off ... But it was all right anyway. She thought he was the clear goods, and now that they were engaged it was going to be hunky-dory, no fooling. And she was a real woman, none of your fifteen-year-old hallway flappers, and Jesus, Jesus, it was wonderful.

It was already too late, he knew, to meet Van and Gladys at the car. They'd probably be off somewhere in the dark getting in their licks. He and Laura would have to ride home on the train, but that would be all right too, sitting on the steps of the open car with the wind off the salt flats, and the smell of the flats that was like no other smell on earth, a stink almost, so that the first time you smelled it you held your nose, but it grew on you, and before long you found yourself sniffing it, liking it, a salt, exciting, sea-smell that was wonderful to take in great gulps when you were driving or riding the train at night. And now there'd be Laura right next, snuggling against him with her head on his shoulder.

Engaged, he said. Holy cats.

Back in his mind was a door that he could open any time he wanted to but he didn't want to now. Behind the door was a sign, and it said in big letters—but he didn't look at the letters because what was the point?—“Chet Mason isn't nineteen, he's only seventeen.” He didn't open the door and he didn't look at the sign, but he knew it was there and he knew what it said.

The papers had it. Chet sat at breakfast eating by feel, his eyes pasted to the sport page of the
Tribune.
That had all that about the stingy East southpaw and about only two West runners reaching second, and about his two doubles. But what held his attention longest was the Sports Chatter column. Bill Talbot, the manager of the Salt Lake Bees, had seen the game from the stands, and had remarked to the reporter that he had seldom seen a high school pitcher with more promise. A good curve ball, the reporter said. But it wasn't the curve that interested Talbot. Anybody could learn to throw a hook. “The kids you want to watch,” he said, “are the ones that can throw a baseball a mile a minute and keep it up all afternoon. When their fast one hops, you want to watch them extra close. This kid's fast one hops.”